Tag: security event logs

Every good blog post about time issues in forensics needs a theme song.

Today’s theme song is Ain’t nobody got time for that from the local band Rubber Duc:

Having a theme song, and more importantly, embedding the Youtube video for said theme song in your blog post, serves the following two purposes:

It keeps the reader here for 3minutes and 18seconds (when viewing it embedded on this page), which will make me and my post analytics think that they actually spent time reading through the entire article.

Gets a song stuck the reader’s head, ideal for when you go back to writing that report you’ve been putting off all week.

Now that we got that out of the way, lets get down to the business of the day:

Identifying Time changes in Windows Event Logs with L2t:

As you’d recall from my previous post, the aim of this series is to play around with quick things you can do at the beginning of an investigation, while for example, waiting for processing to complete. Specifically, those ‘nice to know’ things that takes only a couple of minutes to check…

Time changes on a system can make a simple investigation quite complex very quickly. Sample case is often where a user backdates a system before deleting / creating files.

The following steps should be enough to give you a quick view of user initiated time changes on a system. Remember, this is only to get a high level view, just enough to let you know you need to dig deeper.

Let’s start:

Step 1

First off, we start with processing only the Security and System event logs with Log2Timeline, followed by psort-ing it using the l2tcsv output format. The reason for having a look at the Security and System event logs is that Time change events are recorded in both. Often, the Security event log is quite busy, so chances are that historical events will get overwritten a lot quicker than those in the System event log. My current Security event log has 30,000 entries, with System only sitting at 10,000.

Step 2

Now that we have an output file (in my case SecSysEvt.l2t.csv) which contains the L2T output from the Security.evtx and System.evtx, we can start Grepping.

We’ll do this in two sections:

Dealing with time change events in the Security Event log (this post).

Dealing with time change events from the System event log (next post)

Security Event log

When a time change occurs on a Windows 7 and later system, Event Id 4616 fires. See more about this event at Ultimate Windows Security.

So let’s get grepping:

grep Security\.evtx SecSysEvt.l2t.csv

This will gives us events in our L2T output which came from our Security.evtx file (ignoring events from the System.evtx for now). In my case I have 27,884 Security.evtx events.

Next, we want to narrow it down to only Event ID 4616. The following should do the trick:

grep Security\.evtx SysSec.l2t.csv | grep "EventID>4616"

After this, we clear out some unwanted 4616 events. In this case we are excluding events that were not caused by user action. Remember, we want to know if a user was messing around with the system time.

To accomplish this, we exclude events containing LOCAL SERVICE as well as S-1-5-18:

For this event log, there were 8 time changes, resulting from user actions. 6 by SystemSettingsAdminFlows.exe and 2 by dllhost.exe.

From what I can see on my Win10 test system, SystemSettingsAdminFlows.exe is responsible for making system time changes when a user made use of the “Adjust Date\Time” option from the taskbar. I’m doing some more testing with regards to when dllhost.exe fires on Windows 10. So far I haven’t been able to replicate it…

Remember, this is just a pointer or a flag that gets raised to let you know that it might be useful to have a deeper look at time change events on a system.

Lastly, this grep should work on Windows 7 Security event logs as well (Haven’t tested it on Win8). I ran it on a couple of test Win7 systems, and it was good enough to show a specific application installed by a user was making regular time adjustments across these systems.

I have recently been thinking through ideas for some quick and dirty initial processes one can do at the start of an investigation.

This would typically be whilst you’re doing one of the following:

Waiting on full disk (including VSS) log2timeline processing to complete.

Waiting on Axiom to run the ‘build connections’ module because you forgot to enable the option prior to the initial processing phase.

Waiting on EnCase 8.07 to finish processing, although it’s been sitting at 100% for the last 2 hours.

Trying to figure out where you last saw your FTK dongle.

This brings us to a New Blog Series:

The aim of this post (and hopefully this series) is to play around with things you can do at the beginning of an investigation, while for example, waiting for processing to complete. Specifically things that could be of value to know at the beginning of an investigation.

And, that brings us to today’s post:

Finding failed logon events.

Identifying failed logon events in the Security event log of a system could mean a couple of things:

Someone is attempting to brute force an account.

<add a list of more possible reasons here>

The above extensive list provides good reason why it could be of value to have a quick squiz through a system’s Security Event logs for failed logon attempts.

As such, I wanted to know the following relating to failed logon events:

How many (if any) failed logon attempts were recorded in the system’s security event log.

Which accounts were attempted to log on with the most, as well as the logon types.

What were the top failed source IP addresses recorded.

What date(s) did the most failed logon attempts occur on.

Side note: The sample data I used for this post came from the image provided by Dave and Matt (The Forensic Lunch) as part of the MUS CTF. More about the MUS CTF and the image, check here.

To answer these questions, here’s one quick and dirty way:

Step 1:

Process the Security event log with Log2Timeline (this took just over a minute to process 33,000 events from Security.evtx) :

$ log2timeline.py mus.sec.evtx.l2t securityevt/

Log2Timeline Output

Step 2:

Run psort across the output using the l2tcsv format (this took 30 seconds to run):

$ psort.py -o l2tcsv -w mus.sec.evtx.csv mus.sec.evtx.l2t

Psort Output

Step 3: Grep & Awk

This is where the fun starts. Because it is expected that the output from running log2timeline / psort on a Security event log should provide the same output structure each time, the same commands should work. (I tested this with Security Event logs from Server 2012, Windows 7 and Windows 10 and seems to work on all the different outputs).

We can now see that there were 612 failed Type 3 logon attempts, all on May 5th 2018. It also shows us that the Administrator account was most often attempted to log in with, as well as the top IP addresses where the logon attempts came from.